Introduction

At your organization, you've got a sales team sniffing around for more hot leads, and a marketing team set on creating the best possible lead magnets. How can you keep everything together so that you can perfect your funnel, improve your efforts, and ultimately generate more leads and sales?

The answer may be more straightforward than you think-it's integration. Integrating your email marketing with your CRM can help you perfect your sales and marketing efforts so that you're connecting with customers, driving leads, improving ROI, and ultimately making more sales.

In this whitepaper, we'll explain how to use business integration to your advantage. We'll go over the benefits of CRMs, how sales and marketing can be brought together, as well as how to leverage email in your sales funnel.

In this whitepaper, we'll discuss:

Why you need a customer relationship management system

Bringing sales and marketing together through email and CRM integration

How to support your sales process with email

Developing sales and marketing funnels

Using customer and prospect data for effective email and sales

How the Salesforce and GetResponse integration can help boost your efforts

Why You Need a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System

A customer relationship management (CRM) helps you organize your interactions with prospective and current customers. These systems integrate with existing solutions, such as email marketing software, marketing automation systems, and customer support software.

Key benefits of CRM systems

Effectively using a CRM can help you generate more ROI from your marketing efforts, and help you better understand your customers. Here are some key benefits:

Improved collaboration. Many teams are siloed across departments, and CRMs help close these gaps. Customer interaction happens in one place, and all team members can see what's up. When a customer lifecycle is too complex to be managed by one person, CRM improves collaboration and internal communication accross departments and allows marketing and sales to work as a team.

Boost new business with enriched sales funnels. CRMs can help you define and improve your marketing and sales funnels, which will help reduce cost on customer acquisition. Thanks to CRM, you can identify potential clients, implement retention and loyalty programs, exclude current customers from certain promotional campaigns, and much more.

Improved customer experience. Your customers are the core of your business, and insights from a CRM can help you improve customer support, increase customer satisfaction, keep existing customers around. With a CRM, contacts are segmented better, their activities are tracked, needs are identified, and communication is systematic.

Increased efficiency. CRMs make it easy to collaborate with team members and increase accountability, increasing efficiency in your organization. They exclude manual processes and spreadsheets and introduce fully automized and standarized procedures that consolidate our work.

Data driven customer management. A CRM collects information about customers and prospects, which can help you better serve them. How many times has a prospect called your company looking for information? When they call, what do they want to know about? This information can all be stored in your CRM so that your sales team is prepared to help with their particular needs.

How Integration of Email and CRM can Bring Sales and Marketing Together

At the end of the day, sales and marketing teams both want to attract leads and customers. So why are they so often at odds?

Sales and marketing think about things a little differently. Marketing teams sell through a series of logical steps that convince a prospect that a product is worth buying, and get frustrated when the sales team doesn't follow their instructions. Sales teams, on the other hand, want to work directly with people, which are unpredictable. They rely on their intuition, not their sense of logic, to work with individuals to make sales. Sales gets annoyed when marketing puts more barriers between them and their people.

In comes the integration of email and CRM, which can bring sales and marketing together. When email and CRM work in tandem, they help nurture leads through education before sales even talks to them. Marketing teams like this because it guides prospects through a logical journey, while sales teams are introduced to hot leads.

Combining CRM with email marketing gives benefits such as:

sending personalized, tailor-made emails

saving time and effort

allowing for automatic synchronization of contacts and relevant data

segmenting customers and prospects by individual preferences

ensuring security and spam-free practices.

Supporting Sales Processes via Email

Sales used to be built around cold calling, but that's changed as technology has transformed the way we market and sell to prospects and customers. Marketers are now using inbound marketing-- providing assets and collecting email addresses-- to generate leads, which can then be nurtured through email marketing that supports sales efforts.

Why email?

Email is the perfect channel to engage leads. Here's why:

59% of businesses see email as the best tool to generate more leads, support sales, and increase conversions (GetResponse).

74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email and 63% of mobile email users check their email account a minimum of once per day (Merkle).

There are 3x more email accounts than Twitter and Facebook accounts combined (Radi cati Group).

Email is 40x more successful at acquiring new customers and clients than either Twitter or Facebook (McKinsey & Company).

Sales email cycles

Email works best when you align it with your sales cycle, and a CRM, along with your sales team, can help give you insight into the buyer's journey.

For example, prospects often have questions for your sales team, and may have in depth discussions about their pain points. These questions and pain points can be addressed in your sales email cycle, which can help turn lukewarm leads into hot ones.

You might find that customers are often confused about whether they get their own account manager. To comfort leads, you can include information about having a personalized account manager in your sales email cycle.

This process can also help you make sure you're creating the right lead magnets. Once you understand what's tripping up your leads, you can look to your website to make sure you're providing sufficient answers. Do you have resources that speak to the most common questions and pain points?

Look to your existing lead magnets, and learn which content your leads usually download, and think about what resources might help them in the next step of their journey. Be proactive-- if you can offer answers to their next questions, they won't have to turn anywhere else.

The Sales and Marketing Funnel

So, how does this whole email and CRM integration work? It's all about nurturing leads down the sales funnel with the help of email.

A sales funnel is a funnel, often shown as an upside-down triangle, that brings leads closer to a sale. At the top, the funnel is wide, as it catches everyone who might have a general interest in the company and what's being sold. Only the strongest leads, the ones who are most likely to buy, make it to the bottom of the funnel, where a sale is made.

You can use email to guide leads down the sales funnel depending on the asset they originally download.

Step 1. Create a flow that builds off a lead's first action

Your leads will have different pain points, and it's best to build a sales funnel that builds off a lead's first action, rather than trying to create a catch all funnel that speaks to everyone.

For example, if you notice that customers downloaded a resource on social sharing, you can reasonably conclude that they're looking to improve their social media efforts. Because of this, you can provide them with more resources on social media, and pitch them particular products that can help them improve. You can also capitalize on a customer's first purchase and essentially build an entire sales cycle around the roduct they bought.

Step 2. Move leads towards salesfriendly offers

As outlined above, you want to make sure that every email, even those that push products and services, is connected towards the original action. So, for example, if someone downloads a resource on how to create beautiful invoices from an accounting software company, they should be sold on an invoicing solution, not the client reports

This will increase your email engagement rates, but it will also help leads realize what you can offer.

Step 3. Monitor campaigns as you go

You might not hit the nail on the head in your first go, so it's important that you monitor drop off. Integrating your email efforts into your CRM can give you greater visibility

For example, if you have a sales cycle of three emails, do people open all three, or do they tend to drop off after the first or second email? Determine where people are getting stuck, then work to correct the problem.

Using Customer and Prospect Data for Effective Email and Sales

Effective business integration organizes all essential customer and lead statistics in one place, making it easy for you to leverage data.

You can view newsletter stats and reports, individual contacts, and the particular emails each contact received. Intelligent analytics help you measure your campaign effectiveness and learn more about customer behavior to create tailored sales strategies.

Using data for segmentation

No lead is the same. As an enterprise, you probably have a few different types of buyers that come to your business. If you want to be effective with an email sales cycle, you need segmentation.

When a prospect fills out a form on one of your landing pages, make sure to retrieve information that will help you assess the assets they should receive. For example, managers might receive different messaging than direct reports. The more personalized your efforts, the more likely they are to lead to sales.

Keeping data up to date

CRMs help you keep your data up to date, so that you're always working with the most relevant info. With a CRM and email integration, you can set up syncing once, then synchronize your campaigns in seconds, and save time with single sign-in. Whether you're in your CRM or in your email dashboard, you always get access to your most current data and can edit your subscribers and sync contacts instantly.

Easy database management

Make GetResponse Salesforce integration the hub of your contact management system for generation sales. Build queries for leads and prospects with just one click. Create new GetResponse campaigns and contacts using Salesforce without the need to log in to your GetResponse account.

Bi-directional synchronization

With bi-directional sync, your GetResponse account is entirely reflected in Salesforce, and your data is always accurate. Set it up once, synchronize your campaigns in seconds, and save time with single sign-in. Whether you're in Salesforce or GetResponse, you always get access to your most current data and can edit your subscribers and sync contacts instantly.

Compelling messages

GetResponse offers a variety of tools that add great value to your Salesforce account. Create beautiful messages and save your email drafts in GetResponse, and then use them in Salesforce. Once you're logged in to your Salesforce account, you can test and preview your messages online, and then broadcast them to your entire database.

Advanced native integration

We have built a native integration designed solely to match the Salesforce CRM system. We proudly claim that it is the most technically advanced integration of its kind available on the market. It ensures maximum data security and minimum spam complaints to protect your reputation. Best of all, it's agile, intuitive and reliable.

Personalization & segmentation

Work smarter, sending only highly relevant messages, tailored to your customers' needs. The integration supports up to 100 custom fields to help you segment your audience based on individual preferences and send unique, fully personalized messages.

Measurement & analytics

The GetResponse Salesforce app organizes all essential customer and lead statistics in one place. Now you can view newsletter stats and reports, individual contacts, and GetResponse emails each contact received. Our intelligent analytics help you measure your campaign effectiveness and learn more about customer behavior to create tailored sales strategies.

Flexible integration

You decide which campaigns should be synchronized and how often. Choose manual sync or schedule automatic sync daily, every 3 days, or ever 7. Don't be limited by the volume of emails sent-- we rely on our dedicated servers, so your messages do not generate extra fees from Salesforce.

Help 24/7

Our Integration Experts will walk you through the setup in minutes and answer even the most complex technical questions. The GetResponse Customer Success Team is a multiple award winner for excellence and client satisfaction, helping save you time, effort, and terabytes. With a dedicated Dev Zone and Learning Center, we are fully prepared to support a smooth and seamless installation and solve your issues 24/7.